It has been said that a woman’s work is never done, and I must say that this has been true for me throughout my entire adult life. I was fortunate, however, to have people around me who loved life and brought joy to my work and my play. In the 1980s, my work involved raising children, raising money for Cleveland State University, and raising my voice in song (my play), among other things.
I really like this 1985 picture of me holding my son, “Billy D,” while volunteering at Cleveland State University’s annual alumni phonathon. I first shared this online in a 2015 pre-Mother’s Day Facebook post, since Billy and his older brother Mike, a poet, appear to have inherited an appreciation for hard work and the arts from their mother.
The 2014 image on the right is of me with my voice teacher, Dr. A. Grace Lee Mims, whose love for the Black Arts is a strong now as it was in 1981, when I became her student. I will be celebrating Black Music Month 2015 with Dr. Mims at a June 20th program at the Western Reserve Historical Society, 10825 East Boulevard, Cleveland OH 44106. The event, “The Black Arts,” starts at 1:30 p.m., and the title recognizes the fact that Dr. Mim’s, one of the founders of the African American Archives Auxiliary of the Western Reserve Historical Society, has hosted “The Black Arts” on WCLV Radio for nearly 40 years. This event is free and open to the public, but registrations is required. For more information, please visit www.wrhs.org.
Keep your eyes and years open in June, because you are sure to see and hear more good things during the 2015 celebration of Black Music Month. My hope is that you will always enjoy your work and play!
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 